Video Killed the Blogging Star

Actually, the title couldn’t be further from the truth. It’s just a clever headline that takes me back to my 80s childhood. In fact, videos are a great enhancement to your business blog. A well-done video can really spice up your content and engage viewers on a much higher level than plain text. However, there are some caveats to consider.

There are a couple ways to look at utilizing videos in relation to blogging:

Video Blog (aka “Vlogging”)

Some individual bloggers and businesses will do their blogging entirely in video form. This can be a powerful way of communicating ideas, information and branding messages to target consumers through social media. When done right, it adds a lot of personality and character and it is ideal for today’s on-the-go consumers with short attentions spans as a result of the social media driven world we now live in.

Vlogging is very effective when you already have a strong following on social media and a lot of regular visitors of your YouTube channel. Where you lose a little bit is in terms of SEO and organic website draw. Even if you embed your videos on your website, a relevant search will likely take the person to your YouTube page. That’s not necessarily a bad thing because everybody loves YouTube, but most people aren’t going to take the extra step to click through and get to your actual website unless the call to action in the video is extremely compelling.

In most cases, people will get stuck in what I call a “Tubehole,” which is the wormhole of YouTube where you end up watching about a dozen more videos on the side and you get far away from the original video that brought you there. Someone may end up watching several of your videos in the process, which is great, but odds are they won’t end up still on your channel.

SEO in Videos

In terms of SEO, you can incorporate targeted tags, titles and descriptions when posting the video on YouTube and/or directly on your site. These are great, but you won’t have the full depth of searchable content compared to a text-based blog.

Don’t get me wrong. I am not disparaging video blogging in any way. It is an excellent strategy that you should want to utilize, especially when you have a strong social media following.

The Right Balance

If you follow my blog, you will notice I use the word “balance” an awful lot. That’s because an effective blog will have a good balance of different strategies. The same is true when comparing video to standard text-based blogging. Both are great and both will be very effective in different ways.

You might consider doing some written blogs and some video blogs in a healthy mix. Or, an even better plan is to add relevant videos to your written blog articles, and then you get the best of both worlds. Some people will be more drawn to the written information. Others will be inclined to watch the video first. Both will have strong SEO, so you get the tagged, embedded video in addition to the depth of searchable content in the text portion of blog. It’s a win-win situation!

If you are blogging for your business, consider taking advantage of the power of videos in conjunction with your regular written blog articles. You will find the right balance and combination of the two strategies will attract new consumers and engage existing followers at the same time.